A Secret Visit and Sino-Tibetan Dialogue

posted Jan 1, 2018, 6:25 PM by The Tibetan Political Review

Issues to consider while waiting for the Sino-Tibetan ‘Godot’.

(AP Photo/Ashwini Batia)

Credible sources have confirmed that Samdhong Rinpoche, a prominent
Tibetan leader, recently visited Gyalthang (redubbed as Shangri La
recently), his hometown in Yunnan province of China. According to the
source, the purpose of the visit was to meet his family. In all
likelihood, the visit took place sometime in November; specifically
mid-November, according to the article in The Wire that first broke the news about the visit. Earlier, on November 6, the Dalai Lama appointed
Samdhong Rinpoche, along with Sikyong Lobsang Sangay (the current
president of the Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA, in Dharamsala)
as his trusted “representative” or “personal emissary” for an indefinite
period.

Samdhong Rinpoche preceded Lobsang Sangay as head of the CTA and
played an instrumental role in pushing for the Dalai Lama’s middle way
approach (MWA) during his tenure as president. It was during his
leadership of the CTA that Sino-Tibetan talks resumed in 2002, after
almost a decade of impasse. He also has a close bond with the Dalai
Lama; Samdhong Rinpoche’s residential quarters are located within the
premises of the Dalai Lama’s residence in Dharamsala.

So, given Samdhong Rinpoche’s recent trip to China, is a formal
Sino-Tibetan meeting in the offing? Is it possible for China to take up
the Tibet issue so promptly just after the 19th National Congress of the
Chinese Communist Party? For a long time, many of the Tibetan leaders
in exile have held the belief that Xi Jinping was waiting for his second
term to initiate a major change in Tibet policy. The 19th Party
Congress is now over and Xi has more or less reigned supreme, with Xi
Jinping Thought now comfortably enshrined into the Party Constitution.
Xi was already designated as a “core”
leader at the sixth plenum of the 18th Party Congress in October 2016.
Further, his pet project, “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) or the “Belt and
Road Initiative” (BRI) that he announced in 2013, too made it into the
Party Constitution. Xi also sought to redefine the “principal
contradiction” facing the Party, which had been done by none other than
Mao Zedong himself. Notably, Xi refrained from designating a successor
by limiting the entry of sixth generation leaders, who could have been
eligible to succeed him in 2022, into the Politburo Standing Committee.